Shadow Ascending
by Obsidian Blade
Summary: A Forsaken shadow priestess isolates herself in the frozen wilderness with her two daughters, one still growing, one decaying. Plagued from the start by her own imagination, can she defend her family and her sanity against the threats in the Grizzly Hills? Diary form. Faintly gothic.
1. Chapter 1

I'm going to be keeping my author's notes to a minimum in this story. Chapters will be short and I don't want to interrupt things every 600 words or so. _Shadow Ascending_ is a bit of an experiment; I'm trying to learn how to maintain suspense and atmosphere while trickle-releasing information. Once it's complete from front to back I'll be doing a heavy edit, so any and all constructive criticism would be much appreciated.

* * *

**SHADOW ASCENDING**

**One.**

_Dear diary._

Today I took my first step outside in three weeks and four days. It is so bitterly cold here that I breathed out the warm cabin air as mist for the first few exhales, before the chill slipped down past my gullet and cooled me completely.

In submission to some unnecessary human instinct, I wore wool, leather and fur. The layers creaked as I walked a slow patrol around our hut, with a stick in hand to break down the icicles hanging from the outermost roof slates and to coax down the vast drifts of snow before the roof itself could fall in. My girls followed my progress through the windows, peeling back the felt curtains to watch through the icy glass.

I admit my perfectionist tendencies were today nothing more than a ruse. I wasn't especially concerned about the last patches of snow. I was dawdling. Everything here is so vast: the pine trees, the sweeping hills, and the sky overhead. When I could procrastinate no-longer I stood under the eaves and looked out, and that was all I could see: nature, on an impossible scale.

I came back inside. I can't trust myself to bear it.


	2. Chapter 2

**Two.**

_Four weeks and two days ago, Gunther Arcanus delivered my girls to me._

He was remarkably prompt, for a Dalaran mage with a fondness for Dalaran pipe weed, but I assume he'd been looking forward to the end of his babysitting duties for some time.

Not half an hour after I'd sent my psychic summons, they appeared in a burst of arcane sparks and coloured smoke atop the snow: rail-thin Arcanus standing stork-like in the middle, seven-year-old Holly with her eyes burning yellow at his left, four-year-old Praelia standing sleepily at his right, her Living eyes drooping shut.

She woke quickly at the sight of me, racing forward and throwing her arms around my legs. I saw for the first time just how much she's grown without me. Her baby fat is much diminished, her limbs are longer, and her hair has grown all the way to her shoulders, white-blond and curling at the ends.

She is solid proof of the passage of time. Alone, with my undead body unchanging in the cold, I had lost my way through the days. Now I have a visual reminder of how many weeks have passed straight through me.

Holly's only gesture was to slip her hand through mine and stand silently at my side. She showed the cabin at my back no interest; she ignored her sister's attempts to initiate a group hug; she subjected Arcanus to a blank and uncaring stare that he made no move to return. Instead, he looked at me.

'Where have you been, Miriah?'

That looks accusatory on the page, but there was nothing but concern in his tone. It's a rare thing for one of my people to speak softly, but he did. The arctic wind plucked at the brim of his wizard's hat and lifted it up. Beneath, his withered features were sincere, but I'd been silent for so long that I couldn't think of what to say.

'I'd started to think you'd been done in like the others,' he told me.

My mind stayed blank; my tongue wouldn't stir. It was baffling. I'd had to speak to summon him. How long had it taken me then to decide what to say? I hadn't a clue. Time: immaterial.

'I've a house,' I said eventually, but his brow was already in full crease. His burning Forsaken gaze gave the timber hut only a precursory glance.

'That's no house. It's a peasant's shack. Come back with me.'

I shook my head.

'You'll be so isolated,' he said. Then, gravely: 'I take it that's why you're here.'

A nod. I became aware of Praelia, who rested on my hip, peering curiously at my face. She reached up and touched my mouth. 'No words?'

No words. I couldn't express anything important when I had the chance to speak to Arcanus, so I suppose it doesn't matter that I failed to give him even the empty basics. I managed to thank him and to tell him that I would be fine – that the isolation is nothing, truly. I have my daughters. Somehow they, and the four walls I built with stolen lumber, will fend off the emptiness and help me to heal.


	3. Chapter 3

**Three.**

_Two days from my last entry, seven days from the first, we ran out of food._

I had no choice but to venture outside. Again I piled on the useless layers: linen, wool, leather. As I pulled on my boots I found myself looking over at the girls, curled up in the blankets as it was still early in the morning.

I wanted to wake them, bundle them up in the hide coats I had sewn for them, and take them with me. Not to show them their new home, not to teach them about the plants here, not to provide any benefit for them. I wanted them with me out of fear for myself, out alone in the wilderness again. I wanted to use them as a shield.

As soon as I recognised my own motive, I felt a surge of indignation. It might have been aimed inwardly, but it was strong and bright against the mental monochrome I've been labouring through. It was enough to usurp the spineless coward squatting in my head.

I set out at a brisk pace just as first light was setting in to the east. Pine needles and snow, frozen overnight, crackled underfoot, but it was otherwise quiet: the air was still, save for the occasional stirring of an icy breeze, too meagre to rattle the frost-laden branches overhead.

I was not misled by the silence. Life was all around me. I could sense it in the early morning shadows: foraging creatures skittering about in hollow logs and under fermenting piles of bark and dead foliage; a few departing owls sweeping low overhead; and a herd of deer waking nearby.

I drew the shadows close around me, a defensive cloak to convince any mind I came across that I was unworthy of attention. Slowly, carefully, I crept past each one. The land sloped to the south and I followed it down, where the bulk of Grizzlemaw kept the rising sun at bay and the darkness prevalent.

Grizzlemaw is the broken stump of a fallen tree, a tree so huge I believe it could rival the likes of Teldrassil. The trunk sinks deep into the loam at one end, protruding like a wooden cliff face at the other. The stump has been hollowed out deep down into its roots. That may be the result of whatever blow sundered the tree in the first place, but it seems just as likely that it's down to the whole city of furbolgs who live within it.

Theirs were some of the first minds I encountered here, sapient but tending toward basic, bestial lines of logic. As far as I can tell, they've dedicated themselves to some sort of bear spirit, and cultivation of the tree is supposed to help that spirit in some way.

More importantly, they are well-established here, and have extensive food stores. The possibility of plundering those was what drew me to Grizzlemaw.

Approaching through the shadows, I scaled the outer wall. The bark is twisted and knotted; perfect for climbing. Inside, the ridges of wood are more uniform, but pronounced enough that I was able to half-slide, half-climb down amongst the furbolg huts. Inside Grizzlemaw there's a broad, sloping ledge that follows the curve of the retaining wall, and the huts sit upon this.

I think they may actually be porches over front doors, but the furbolg sleep up against them anyway, with canopies of woven plant fibre overhead. Most are covered with moss, too. Additional protection against the falling snow, I suppose.

Regardless, the sound of so many creatures breathing long and deep, snuffling occasionally and shifting in their sleep, gave me pause. After the silence outside, with life evident only through my mind-sensing spells, it inspired the passing thought that the tree itself was alive and breathing through the furbolg.

I did not find it a peaceful thought. I'm Forsaken. The Living are my foes. I wove my deflecting spell more tightly around me and fell back on some regulated breathing myself, just to divert my attention from the thought that they might wake up. Any pang of discomfort could easily develop into claustrophobia after so long hidden away from people.

Above me, the jagged walls of the stump encircled a disc of sky beginning to lighten. I picked my way between two sleeping bodies – both white pelts, I noticed, like all the others there – and started down the spiralling path, pausing to gather the pine nuts they'd stored in shelves carved into the wall.

Toward the bottom the huts, and the pine nuts, began to taper out, until only the path remained. That, too, flattened and disappeared beneath soil and greenery. The furbolg had cultivated a garden of sorts there at the bottom, with grass and clover, tiny flowers, a shallow pond and a mound of compost at the very centre. A single sapling sprouted from it, tall and slender, splitting into tiny shoots toward the top.

There was something malignant about it. Repellent. As a mind-mage I have learned not to ignore what others might dismiss as nothing more than an imagined 'bad feeling'. More often than not, it's prescience. I approached the tree cautiously, fumbling with my coat until I tugged off my mittens to dip my hand into my robe pocket.

I had extracted the broken glass a few weeks before, but the rest of my supplies remained: metal tongs, a sheathed, narrow knife, and several squares of linen. With the knife I took two cuttings, and I wrapped them in cloth. There was no food to be found in the garden and the furbolg were beginning to stir up above, so I retreated back up the slope after that, although I took note of a tunnel going deeper that I may return to check. It seems like a sensible place to keep further stores, underground.

The cuttings I brought with me in my pocket. One is for testing, because if the tree has some sort of dark power to it, I would be a fool to let that slip through my fingers. The second I intend to pin to the door. If it is repellent to me, it may well ward off visitors too. Friend or foe, I've no interest in outside contact for now. But I note my trip outside has lifted some of the fog from my mind already. Perhaps overcoming challenges is key.


	4. Chapter 4

**Four.**

_Three days from my last entry, ten days from the first._

Just a note regarding my examination of the shoots from Grizzlemaw. The plant is most certainly corrupt. The internal fibres are a gnarled tangle, the sort I might expect to see in an elderly tree. The sap is viscous and dark.

I do not believe this is the result of chemical intervention. I have tested for traces of numerous poisons and typical contaminants. Each test returned a negative.

This isn't simple arcane corruption either. I'm reminded of the Scourge metal we examined in Dragonblight, at the foot of Icecrown's fortifications. Our research there suggested, but never confirmed, that the changes stemmed from power _transmedeis_: energy that crosses between the magic schools as we have defined them.

Either Northrend is a font of boundary-breaking energies, or my tree samples have kinship with saronite. I could not have hoped for a more perfect find.


	5. Chapter 5

**Five.**

_Two days from my last entry, twelve from the first._

It has been proven to me by my girls that cabin fever is most certainly a real thing, and that 'bouncing off the walls' is not hyperbole. While I have been conducting my experiments, trying to convince the shadow to mimic the arcane, they have been breaking things. Not intentionally, you understand, but because they have this constant need to discharge energy.

They bound through the narrow gaps between bed and table, table and walls, and their shoulders bump the chair, and the chair slowly creeps closer with each lap they make until it bumps the table, and the contents of the table slowly creep until they're on the floor in pieces.

Lessons are exercises in futility when the children are like this. They can't focus long enough to read, or even to sit still. They're forever jumping up to paw at the windows or at my skirts.

This doesn't annoy me, although it is extremely disruptive, so much as it shames me. It's impossible to pretend that I'm not imprisoning them in this tiny wooden box when they are so obviously bored.

I'd go so far as to say that Praelia's health is suffering for it: she no-longer sleeps through, and when she does doze off she quickly slips into dreams that leave her restless and uncharacteristically irritable come morning.

So we are outside today. I have marked out a section of land in which I can see the girls at all times while I sit and work on the front porch, but I haven't really been working.

In the house I felt I was on the cusp of something new, something that might bring me closer to successfully binding the shadow into a physical form other than my own, but I'm constantly anxious out here, too much so to carry a coherent line of investigative thought. It's taken me nearly an hour just to write this entry, in fact, simply because I have to scan the perimeter after every other word I pen.

Lia and Holly have no understanding of danger. They love the mountains and the woods: they want to visit everything they can see, from the snowy peaks to the darkest gullies. They race about oblivious to the beasts that might be lurking in the blind spots behind the trees. They lie on their backs on the grass and gaze up at the open heavens with nothing but awe.

I look to the south, where the sky is at its most expansive between the mountains and the treetops, and for a moment I don't see clear blue but a green haze, followed by the red-gold glow of searing dragonfire. My skeletal left hand prickles, like the flesh is there again.

For the first time ever, I think I am completely under the yoke of fear, and I do not know how to escape.

* * *

The children are asleep. It is dark and the fire is fast on its way to red embers that give little light, so I will be brief.

I called the girls in when dinner was ready and the sun had just struck the horizon on its descent. Lia reached me first and tried to push past with her mud-laden boots on. I turned from the door to catch her shoulder and oversee their tidy removal.

When I looked back, Holly was standing on the chair I had occupied all afternoon. In her hand she held the Grizzlemaw clipping. She rolled it slowly between her fingers, her brown brows folded low.

'Miriah, is it ours?' she asked as I drew nearer.

'It's a part of the forest,' I told her. 'I found it and brought it here.'

'Why?'

'You don't like it?'

I had yet to confirm that anyone other than me felt the same revulsion around the thing; I found myself watching her with baited breath. She gave me a serious look.

'No.'

'Why not? What do you think of it?'

'I don't like it,' was all Holly would say. Her expression turned accusatory. 'Why do you keep bad things?'

I told her that it would drive off evil, but her words are with me still. I do keep bad things: endless bad memories all held close to my heart. Is that the source of the fear? Nature is meant to be a person's last and unfaltering reprieve: perhaps it's neither the open spaces nor the ranks of trees that frightens me. Maybe what I'm truly afraid of are the memories, echoing back to me from every wall of silence.


	6. Chapter 6

**Six.**

_The day after my last entry, thirteen days from the first._

I have found several problems with this house:

- the wooden decking it sits upon creaks incessantly, waking me at night;

- draughts, essentially everywhere but worst under the door;

- limited storage for water and food;

- the smell, or so Lia tells me (and I have to trust her on this, as she is the only one of us with a fully-functioning nose);

- and the lack of natural light, which arrives late and leaves early due to the trees and the mountains.

* * *

Letting the children out yesterday was a good decision that granted me the best night of sleep I've had in weeks.

I woke before the light, stoked the fire until the red embers sent up ribbons of yellow flame, and made the above list of faults. Subsequently, I applied myself to my studies. Shadow transmutation remains difficult and tiring. While I can transform my bone arm with ease, flesh and blood increases the challenge significantly. Inanimate objects and other forms of magical power remain quite beyond my scope.

After fighting to enshadow a glass of water I actually took a nap until it was time to wake, feed and scrub the children. I gave them my list and let them puzzle out solutions for the problems while they ate.

By the time we were all ready to face the day, it was just creeping down through the treetops. We spent the next twenty minutes pulling on all the layers I have been fastidiously knitting and sewing. Finally we set out into the morning air.

It was so cold I heard the inside of my nose crackle on my first inhale. While our coats, jumpers and long underwear work wonders (despite the small army of bumps and tangles I invariably knit into everything I make) any exposed skin, namely our faces, actually hurts at the touch of these kinds of temperatures, even for Forsaken like Holly and I. We must be softer than our Scourge counterparts.

I gave Lia my scarf to wrap around her head. While she could only just see through the weave, both she and her sister refused to return to the house to wait for the heat, so the scarf was the best I could do.

'And,' she said triumphantly, holding onto my shoulder as I carried her on my hip, 'now I'm a no-face wool monster.'

'Y'always a monster,' Holly grumbled as she trotted alongside.

'Aye!' said Lia with relish.

Between their chatter and the tasks we'd set out to complete, I kept quite calm in the wilderness. By the river we gathered mud and clay, which we used to fill the gaps in the cabin's woodwork. We stuffed a tube of wool with pine needles to block the gap under the door and perhaps provide Lia with a fresher fragrance about the place. We beat at the nails in the porch planks, ostensibly to hammer them down securely.

In actuality it became an excuse to flail about with sticks. Lia has something of a vicious streak, I note, at least where the thrashing of inanimate objects is concerned. She struck with such vigour that the sapling cutting toppled from its mount on the door and landed right in front of her.

She would have smashed it, had I been any slower stepping in. I caught her stick at the start of its downward sweep.

'Lia,' I admonished.

'What?' The scarf wrinkled as she scrunched up her face in disgust. 'It's horrid.'

'It protects us from evil,' said Holly.

'No, it _is_ evil,' said Lia.

It's not, it is, it's not, it is: the argument devolved. While the girls held one another's attention, I stooped to retrieve the sliver of wood. It had dried out and curled up crookedly around the pin I'd run through its middle. All the living green had bled away. It had turned to grey in the cold.

As I closed the bone fingers of my left hand around it, I felt that odd prickling across my palm again, where there was no flesh to feel any such thing.

Cautiously I bid the shadow to manifest. As dark purple smoke it trickled down my exposed radius and ulna, weaving through my wrist and around the cutting.

I felt the great age of it first: decade upon decade, past what I could easily comprehend. It had to be centuries. I want to say millennia, but I have to remind myself that, at twenty-three years of age, I can't rightly speculate so far beyond what I know.

At least it is clear that the sapling the cutting came from could not possibly be so old. It must have inherited its story from the huge tree of Grizzlemaw itself, but as I probed further to make sure of it, a dull ache pressed in between my eyes. My dead heart shuddered against my ribs; my stomach dropped. I was falling, deep, deep down into the earth; soil and stone and fossilised teeth pressed in all around me; my bones bowed and creaked beneath the pressure; and I felt Grizzlemaw, no, _Vordrassil_, crack open overhead—

I recoiled, stumbling backward over one of the planks we'd accidentally loosened. I had to drag hard on the shadow to recover it. As it slipped back into my reserves it felt dense and oily. I shuddered, and looked up to find Holly staring straight at me. Her sudden lack of movement alerted Lia as well, and I had both pairs of curious eyes to deal with.

'I've had a thought,' I said, but had to stop and clear my throat, wet my lips, before I could continue. '_I'm_ here to protect you, aren't I? So, if you really don't like the stick, Lia, then we can be rid of it, can't we?'

'Yes!' cried Lia.

'No!' said Holly. 'We _need_ it.'

'I think it would be for the best-' I started.

Holly stamped her foot. 'You _always_ side with her.'

'_And this time I'm doing so with very good reason_,' I snapped. 'Acquiesce.'

Holly went very still, gazing at me over her sister's shoulder. 'Aye. You're here to protect us. We can get rid of the stick.'

I felt quite ill right away as I looked down into her face, so suddenly compliant, but I was still shaken. I didn't move to make amends right away. For a moment I even felt queasily in control.

'Good,' I said as Lia wrapped her arms around my leg. 'I'm glad we're agreed.'

I dislodged my daughter and stepped down from the raised wooden porch onto the grass beneath. The wisest way, I felt, would be to throw the cutting in the river, which would carry it all the way out to sea, but I couldn't face the trip. I would lose it between the trees instead, I decided. Amongst all the other twigs and the detritus of the forest floor, we would not chance upon it again.

'Can I?' asked Holly, her voice pitched low.

When I looked around, her face looked like that of a child again, no-longer blank but full of emotion: timidity, sadness. How could I do anything but soften at the sight of her?

'Aye, of course.'

I reached back toward her and squeezed her small, cold hand when she set it in mine. I helped her down onto the grass and we started toward the trees. Praelia stayed behind, sitting on the edge of the porch with her legs swinging below, her head tilted to the side as though she were a curious bird.

Beneath the eaves of the pine trees, all was cast in deep, green shade. Hand in hand we picked our way around the shrubs and over fallen branches. Holly kept her eyes downcast. A bloom of rot I had overcome too late scarred her left cheek and accentuated the severity of her expression. Her brown hair, plaited gently just that morning and tied with a strip of black velvet from my ruined robes, was thinning over her ear, where she always used to secure it.

She looked up at me when we reached a particularly dense copse of trees. Her golden eyes pierced the gloom, glowing steadily in their shadowed sockets.

'Here will do,' I agreed. Cautiously I passed her the cutting.

She looked at it for a moment, her brow furrowing. Then she stooped and brushed back the fallen pine needles between the bared roots of a sprawling bush, nestled the coil of wood there in the soil, and covered it.

'Well done,' I said.

Holly only nodded. On the way back, I watched her craning her neck, soaking in the details of every tree we passed. I stopped on the edge of the clearing where our house stood and crouched to look her in the eye.

'You're not to go back there,' I told her.

She shifted her weight from foot to foot and tugged at the hem of her coat. 'Are you ordering me?' she asked.

I thought of the earth pushing in on all sides while that giant tree cracked overhead, of her careful attention to our route, and of the way she was squirming there before me.

'Yes,' I said.

Holly grimaced and hunched up her shoulders. She scrubbed between her eyes with both hands. As we went back to the house she wouldn't look at me, and while I was making dinner I was aware of her on the bed, curled up in the corner, her gaze on my back.

'You promised you wouldn't,' she said at last as we lay down for bed.

She is right. I allowed a fleeting hallucination to utterly overpower me. I knew it from the moment the order left my mouth, but hearing it from Holly cast my understanding in solid steel: my fear really has overcome me, and I have made a colossal mistake.


	7. Chapter 7

**Seven.**

_The day after my last entry, fourteen days from the first._

The Shadow is like its mundane counterpart: it takes the shape of other your hand up to the sunlight and its duplicate will be there on the wall behind. You form the stencil that guides the darkness.

The magical Shadow is much the same in this respect. I don't cast spells, not like a mage or a warlock. There are no incantations involved in my work. I bid the Shadow to slip around the object of my choosing – my own will, another person's plan or a part of my body – and it forms a projection.

In this way I take my purpose and put its duplicate in someone else's head to control them, or take a cast of their thoughts to peruse at my pleasure, or turn my bone fingers into something dark and translucent.

There are caveats, of course. The Shadow will not hold a form forever without help. Should it take too many casts of minds greater than mine, it may hunger for a better mistress. While it can morph my body, it will not do the same for someone else's – at least, it has not been known to yet.

I told Holly all of this, seated at the table with my journals splayed around us.

All day I had worked to earn her forgiveness. First thing in the morning, I snared a wolf's mind and used it to capture a hare: Holly's favourite meal. I had breakfast ready before I woke her and I allowed her to eat it in bed. I read aloud one of the stories she had written, as she always asks me to do. I favoured her in lessons. I promised to let her sleep with my pillow as well as her own.

As she had done in response to every other gesture, she stared coldly at me as I told her about my power. She kept her lips pressed together, her brows a wavering line.

'What I'm trying to do is master transformation,' I continued. I have always kept my research to myself, even from the girls, but my old need for secrecy seemed like the perfect boundary to cross if I was to show Holly I trusted her still. 'Trans_mutation_, even. From one shape into another. There is one thing that unifies the Forgotten Shadow, and that's the myth of the Shadow Ascendant: of a caster so powerful she can give herself utterly to the Shadow, transforming every aspect of her physical form, from her limbs to her very mind.'

'No body? So she'd be a Shadow ghost?' Holly asked.

On one hand I was elated that she had spoken after a morning spent mute; on the other, I was not blind to the potential pitfalls this topic presented. I kept my tone level but encouraging. 'I daresay she would be, aye. Not that I have a great deal of faith in such a state. The Shadow can duplicate thoughts, memories, dreams and desires: if a caster transformed fully, her power would have all the skills and knowledge to sew those things together and effectively become her. Who's to say she'd ever come back, that the Shadow wouldn't replace her altogether, the perfect clone?'

'Mama,' murmured Praelia from the bed, where she was dozing after a heavy lunch. 'Don't like scary stories.'

'Now then, go back to sleep,' I said to her. 'There really is no such thing as a Shadow Ascendant.'

'Sometimes people get afraid of things that don't exist,' said Holly, staring at me.

'Perhaps,' I said lightly. 'But, curving back to my point, with the mind left intact I see no reason why the rest of the transformation can't be done. Elaborate multi-material transmutation into Shadow. And _I_ think, with enough practice and discipline, it might just be possible to do for someone else.'

'You want to make Shadow corpses?' Holly asked.

'That's _not_ how I'd put it, no.'

'Because you like to use words to make things sound better,' she said.

I shut my mouth and gave her a long look, purposefully counting down to interrupt my temper. Holly stared back for only a few seconds before her nerve gave way and she looked down at her lap, sullen and angry.

'I am sorry about yesterday,' I said under my breath. 'You're quite right, I was spooked, but that's no excuse. All I can do is apologise, Holly.'

Wilfully she refused to meet my gaze or say a word. Instead she drew one of my journals toward her and began to read through it, skimming the records of my ill-fated attempts to master arcane conjuring spells, my investigation of the accursed twig, and the daily measure of my growing pool of Shadow.

I decided to leave her to it. Normally I would never tolerate this sort of behaviour, but then I've never slipped up like this with her before. I simply have no idea how to deal with her when she is legitimately the wronged party.

I stewed the rest of the rabbit for dinner and served it as she prefers. She treated me to utter silence over the dinner table and a half-sneer before she hurled herself on the bed and curled up with all the covers, including, of course, my promised pillow.

What worsened it was the look on Lia's face, absolutely horrified, and the way she dithered between us when Holly called her over. I had to nod my acceptance before she sloped, still hesitant and upset, to the bed and curled up beside her elder sister.

She settled herself so that one wide eye could peer worriedly over at me through a curl of white-blond hair. When I did nothing but watch, shocked to helplessness, that eye began to fill and I couldn't hold off anymore. I approached the bed to hug her – only for Holly to huff and flatten herself against the wall to put as much distance between us as possible as though I were something plagued.

This only distressed Lia more. In the end I kissed her head and left her with a ribbon of my violet shadow power coiled comfortingly around her arm while I went to rest in a chair across the room.

I'm still there now. I've neither come to a logical plan of action nor stumbled into a revelation, so this is where I'll stay the night. I'm just not sure what else to do.


	8. Chapter 8

**Eight.**

_Fifteen days from my first entry._

I dreamt of making love to my husband last night: Praelia's father, lost to me years ago.

I have long since lost any need for sex. I don't yearn for it; I don't think of it often. But this dream came to me unbidden, reminding me not of the passion but the gentleness. I woke into the memory of a time when I had a partner and an equal. Someone to debate with, to plan with; someone I lay with beneath the sheets, my skin to his, with our voices engaged in query and consent, in love and affirmation.

Steadily that memory gave way to the dull ache in my bones from a night in a chair. The glow from the fire had gone and there was ice on the inside of the windows, lit silver by the moonlight streaking through the treetops.

Stiffly I rose and went to look out, something twitching in the back of my head. Scraping my finger over the ice left a white track through the thick, distorting ripples. The world outside was murky and misshapen: the tree trunks had grown wild and twisted; the ground, bright with frost and starlight, curved up at the sides as though rising to engulf the building; and the full moon held a fragmented sense of movement that reminded me so strongly of a reflection on water that, for a moment, the black sky was the open ocean rushing down toward me.

I wouldn't have been able to look away, so caught up in the night time conviction that I would be crushed by the sea, if not for the shadowy shape that slipped across the white grass below. It stopped in the middle of the meadow long enough for me to be entirely sure that it was there, but the ice was so thick I couldn't make out the details.

Twisted through the glass, it seemed tall, tapered toward the feet, broad across humped shoulders, but was there a head? I could not see one. I lost the chance to be sure either way when it faded back into the darkness and the undergrowth.

In the same moment, the tickle in the back of my mind came to fruition. I'd been in such a state the night before that I hadn't gone through my evening rituals. I hadn't banked the fire to make it last. The ache in my bones wasn't from the chair; it was from the cold, such cold that there was ice on the inside of the glass–

I abandoned the window and the twisted world beyond it and stumbled to the bed, digging down through the nest of blankets and pillows for my daughter. I found her head resting against Holly's shoulder. Her pulse beat sluggishly in her throat; I couldn't rouse her. Pain stabbed through my fingertips as I summoned up the Light just to see. Lia was impossibly pale. Even the pink of her lips had cooled to icy grey.

My panicked movement had woken Holly; she flinched back from me, glaring, but everything I was feeling must have been painted on my face, because her aggression turned quickly to worry and confusion. She looked to Lia for guidance and witnessed her unhealthy pallor.

'Rub her, try to wake her,' I said stiffly, my throat so tight I could barely force out the words.

I had to revive the fire, but when I touched the logs they collapsed into ash, burned through entirely. New logs. Dry kindling. The flint spat sparks that wouldn't catch. Panic choked me. I staggered to the table where Holly had left my journal.

I didn't look at the pages to see what I was about to destroy. I grabbed a handful of paper and tore it clear from the book's spine. I balled it loosely and thrust it into the fireplace, then grabbed more; I set the journal in my lap and wrenched out my notes in fistfuls to stuff into the grate.

When the next spray of sparks flew, the paper caught. I threw notebook and flint aside, blowing at the glowing, crinkling edges until they burst into real flame. With my cloak I fanned the fire until the wood caught too. Holly dragged Lia into the first billows of heat, but my little girl was unresponsive. Her head lolled to the side when I rubbed her shoulders, her eyes utterly still behind their lids.

'Warm her from the inside?' Holly squeaked out, pointing with one shivering finger toward the cauldron over the fire.

It was half-full with water that had almost frozen over. It would take too long to heat ice and all. Gasping with the effort, I hauled the cauldron from the supporting hooks. It crashed down into the grate in an explosion of soot and sparks, but I heaved it into my arms and staggered toward the door.

I had forgotten the creature on the grass. Lia was the only thought I could sustain. Holly leapt up to pull the door open for me and I stumbled out onto the porch, sloshing water down onto the ground. I needed only enough for a single cup-

My shoulders were the first points of impact. The sheer weight of the beast threw me over backward. The cauldron crashed down on my hip with a splintering crunch and the plank beneath us split, wedging me into the gap with the creature bearing down overhead.

Its claws bit into my shoulders; a flurry of teeth went for my throat. I brought my skeletal arm up just in time. Tooth grated against bone, catching just beneath my elbow, and for a moment the worgen's snarling, furred face was thrust right up to mine, madness in its red eyes, its spittle flying. I heard Holly screaming.

_Kill it,_ the Shadow urged me as my body flooded with pain.

I drove my teeth into its sopping nose and my thumb into the depths of its ear. The worgen snarled and fought to pull back, but its teeth caught fast on my arm. I drew the Shadow up around my hand and forced it like a spear down into the beast's ear canal.

It screamed. Every muscle engaged suddenly in retreat. A wild shake of its head hauled me from the broken decking: I crashed against the cauldron as it dragged me in an upward arc, the ground swinging dizzily below me, my shoulder wrenching – until a thunderous crack split my arm apart and sheer momentum hurled me clear.

I struck the porch shoulder-first and collapsed onto my side, worgen snot in my mouth and splinters of my own bone littering the decking. At an absurd angle I saw the monster howl again, thrashing about and clawing at its injured ear. Then it focused dead ahead, the firelight gleaming in its narrowed eyes, and leapt toward the open cabin door.

The Shadow surged through me, bearing a moment half a decade old. Blood caked the cobbles of Stratholme's winding streets, and I remembered the drunken, spluttering stumble of my Living mind as it stuttered out its last, dragging every organ down with it. I recalled one last surge of searing heat, my hands and feet prickling, my vision thinning and giving way to the darkness behind. I felt the silence claim the last beat of my heart.

With that uniquely Forsaken experience, I pierced the worgen's animal skull.

'Die,' I snarled.

Its shoulder struck the doorframe as its back legs gave out. Familiar confusion slackened the planes of its face. Its ears flicked back; its head slumped to the side. It gave a low whine, its red eyes searching, before the light behind them flickered out. The beast lay still.

* * *

For some time, so did I. I could hear Holly crying inside the hut. Lia would be slumped somewhere beside her, no doubt.

I couldn't reach them. While the freezing air soaked deep into the spongy marrow of my snapped arm, my knees smarted as they struck crimson cobbles. Ash clogged my lungs, muting any protest I might have made. Through a greying veil of tears I stared up into the featureless visor of a Lordaeron soldier, who raised his sword and toppled me with a slap of the blade.

I remembered the feel of my blood moving without my heartbeat to guide it. Gravity became its new master. It slunk through my veins and pooled along my right side, where it thickened to paste and burst my capillaries, blighting me with the purple bruising that mars my right arm, leg and flank even now.

I remembered the paralysis, my consciousness preserved by my Shadow reserves, as the rest of the dead began to rise. I remembered the sound of their teeth on the bodies of those who lay still; I remembered the shambling footsteps as someone unliving drew steadily closer–

'Miriah, Miriah, Miriah, please.'

The first thing I noticed about Holly was the blood all up her hands and wrists – my blood, smeared there as she grasped me by the shoulders and shook me back to reality. I tried to speak and my words came out garbled, but it was enough to paint her face with relief. She threw her arms around me and squeezed.

'I thought you were dead, I thought it'd killed you- what?' She leaned closer to listen.

'Pocket,' I croaked out again. Slowly the real pains took the place of the old memories: a dull ache from my snapped arm; shifting, spiking discomfort in my hip and pelvis; and a foreboding nothingness from both gashed shoulders that promised far worse soon enough.

'This pocket?' Holly asked between hiccoughs, reaching into a fold of my dress and pulling out my handkerchief. 'As, as a bandage?'

'Your hands,' I said. 'Awful mess.'

Which meant I was in shock, of course. With the pain parcelled away to the back of my mind, I staggered to my feet and my pelvis _grated_, for lack of a better word. Limping like one of the brain-dead Scourge, hardly able to walk a straight line, I passed the dead worgen and entered the house.

Holly kicked the thing over and shut the door behind me before darting ahead, helping me to sit, and leaning Praelia against my chest. It was a great struggle just to get my good arm around my unconscious daughter. I remember looking into the roaring flames, so hot they spluttered green at their tips, and nothing else thereafter.


	9. Chapter 9

**Nine.**

_Fifteen days from my first entry._

Holly has been working hard. She scraped the fat from the remains of the rabbit and tore bread into pieces for her sister while I attended to her temperature, brewing the very last of our medicinal tea.

In the early hours of this morning, Lia stirred and woke. Not fully: she was still drowsy and weak, lolling against my injured shoulder as I hand fed her the bread and rabbit.

Holly perched nearby and held out the cup of cold tea when I asked for it. In tiny, hesitant sips, Lia drained the mug. Her little hand balled in the front of my robes and she scrunched up her face with an unhappy gurgle. Holly reached out and stroked her hair.

For a moment, relief united us after a hellish night. Neither of us had slept. We kept watch over Praelia for the most part, but the door and windows demanded a vigil as well. The baying of the local wolves had been a nightly, distant occurrence for weeks, but now they carried real threat.

Perhaps two hours before dawn, Holly approached me with needle and thread to stitch up my wounds and return me to some semblance of a proper guardian. Her fingertips had brushed just lightly the older cut above my heart, her brow furrowing, before she had focused on her task and temporarily sealed the worst gashes.

Now, her golden eyes met mine and I risked a smile. Whatever softness Lia had granted her bled away immediately. She looked away quickly, frowning.

'No more fighting.'

Lia's voice surprised us both. Holly sat back, brows high. While I fussed over her sister as much as my injuries would allow, she stayed pragmatic.

'I have every reason to fight,' she said.

'No,' said Lia. She has a slight lisp she's always tried to compensate for. Even on the verge of unconsciousness, she spoke slowly and carefully, her grey eyes wide and brow furrowed in concentration. 'You're not angry enough anymore. Not arguing-angry.'

'Yes I am,' said Holly.

'No.'

'I am.'

'You don't have the lights,' said Lia, gesturing weakly to the air around the older girl.

For a moment we both stared at her in confusion, until it dawned on me that she was still partly asleep, caught up in a dream. Rather than let Holly further frustrate herself by arguing with someone presently functioning in their own sphere of logic, I squeezed my daughter's hand and played along as transparently as I dared.

'You could see Holly's anger in lights, hn?'

'Aye,' said Lia as firmly as her wavering voice allowed. 'Or not lights. Other things but _like_ lights. No different from seeing happiness and sadness, only not happiness _or_ sadness.'

'She's not right,' said Holly, equal parts worried and irate. She gave me a suspicious glance, as though I might be somehow responsible.

The last thing I wanted to do was agitate my ailing four-year-old by suggesting everything she was seeing was merely part of some fever dream. 'Maybe you inherited my mind magic, Lia,' I suggested. 'When I was a little girl I saw things too, you know, because I'd projected them into the Shadow all around me.'

Holly either refused to play along or simply didn't realise I was humouring her sister. 'Is there any Shadow involved in this? Wouldn't any Shadow power go to you, not her?'

'I can't say I've sensed anything like that,' I conceded.

'It's not Shadow,' Lia mumbled, burying her face in my armpit.

'Something from her dad?' asked Holly.

'No, I don't think so,' I said. 'Lydon hadn't any psychic inclination. His magic was based in the arcane.'

'A conjuror? Maybe Lia's accidentally summoning things,' said Holly.

'No, not that sort of mage.'

My tone must have been telling, because insight flickered in Holly's eyes and she skipped a few more obvious guesses. She looked at me keenly. 'A necromancer.'

'Aye,' I admitted.

'Don't be mad.' Lia was falling back into sleep; she pawed at my front until I took her hand gently in my own.

'I just want to know,' said Holly. 'Did he teach you, Miriah?'

My shoulder wounds were held shut by her stitches. My ruined arm was secure against my chest because she had made the sling.

'Aye,' I said. 'But only a little and very reluctantly.'

'Maybe he knew it would be better if you couldn't cast those spells,' said Holly.

Praelia was out cold again, slumbering against me. I regarded Holly quietly.

'Have you thought about what it would mean for you, if he'd chosen not to teach me at all?' I asked her.

'Yes,' she said. Her gaze dipped away from me.

I laid Lia against the pillows and rose to embrace Holly, but she darted away, keeping the table between us. Neither of us said anything: fervently she built a barrier between us with her glare until I held still. Then she went to stoke the fire, her chin on her knees, her knuckles yellowing as she gripped the poker. She hunched her shoulders against me.

I am keeping a careful eye on her, while busying my hands writing this. We are on the cusp of something, something that may well hurt.


	10. Chapter 10

**Ten.**

_Nearly four years ago, I met Holly's father for the first time._

Hecter was a skilled and silver-tongued deathstalker, with dark hair, a strong face and precious little rot. He and I worked for the same conclave of Forsaken. While I studied the Shadow and dealt primarily with civilian affairs, his affable, charming and direct nature led him to become our resident diplomat, meeting with our allies amongst the Living Horde. He and I became good friends because we were equally driven in our respective fields. When Lia's father disappeared, Hecter helped me to care for her.

Ours wasn't the family unit I had hoped for. My mind trailed often to Lydon and I think Hecter knew it. He might even have known that I would have left in pursuit of my missing husband if ever I found a worthwhile lead and the opportunity to chase it. We never discussed the matter. Instead we maintained a friendly alliance, looked out for one another, and raised Praelia between us.

My mother had always been adamant that a single mother could never successfully raise a child; I had internalised that opinion thoroughly. Soon I felt I owed Hecter a great debt. When he revealed that he had a daughter of his own, a little girl who had died of a fever at the age of seven, and that he wanted her back, I agreed to inspect the corpse for the possibility of resurrection. I had witnessed his wistfulness around Lia; I knew how much he yearned for blood family.

Thus, two years and four months ago, we arrived in Darkshire, where Hecter expected his child to be buried. We checked the graves ourselves and found nothing. Hecter crept into the town hall to read through their records. While Holly's death had been registered by a local physician, there was no note of a burial or a cremation.

We found our way to his family home, a thatched cottage on the northern outskirts of town. His wife, Eleanor, lived there still. The sight of her affected Hecter in a way I had never witnessed before; he turned shaky and irrational; he wanted to run to her, as though she would receive him well in his new state.

I took over the operation. For days we observed the house and logged her activities. It proved to be a waste of time: Eleanor had no structure to her life. On one day there was no sign of her until the late afternoon, when all she did was open her front door, look out, flinch and retreat back inside; on another she was up early and headed out toward Darkshire, only to hurry back a half-hour later; on another she disappeared out so early we almost missed the sight of her departing. She didn't return until late in the evening.

In retrospect, with my recent experiences to reference, I recognise the actions of a woman faltering. But I was haughty at the time. I had seen the powerful sway the mere sight of her had over Hecter, and I was jealous. The nature of the mission, too, made her into an obstacle above all else. All I wanted to do was bypass her entirely, search her house and be on our way. Her erratic comings and goings presented no clear window of time in which to do this. I decided mind control was by far the safest way.

Back then, I needed to be physically close to a target to enslave them. My chosen place this time was the roof. Hecter and I climbed a nearby tree and clambered across as quietly as we could. It was night and the candles inside had been extinguished. We expected Eleanor to be asleep, her dreams the perfect gateway to her consciousness. But when I stretched out with the Shadow, I found her wide awake directly beneath us, in an attic room that Hecter knew nothing about.

I chose not to puppet her directly. Instead I slipped my consciousness in alongside hers, an invisible passenger, and watched through her eyes. To call that hollow between the eaves an attic was overly optimistic: it was compromised of a few boards nailed together with a ladder leading up from the floor below.

Eleanor sat cross-legged in the tiny space, her head stooped low. A tallow candle burned unevenly to her left, guttering and spitting out hot fat. Ahead of her lay Holly, still and cold, arranged neatly on a sky blue blanket with her bob of brown hair carefully brushed and her pale hands folded over her chest.

Through Eleanor's Living nose I picked up the sharp scent of embalming fluid, but it was oddly faded, giving way to the softer, oilier tang of decay. As I watched, Eleanor reached out and lifted her daughter's arm. The underside of the wrist was blackening with rot. She sucked in a whimpering breath and sent a surge of the Light into the afflicted area. Though she poured in power, the flesh beneath the restored skin retained a grey shadow. The decay would be back soon.

As I struggled to absorb what I was seeing, Eleanor spoke. I cannot remember her precise words, but I do recall the wavering, quiet sound of her voice. With short words and simple sentences, she told her daughter all the details of a fabricated life.

Queen Tiffin, she said, had come personally to the house to commission a dress. The desolate house Hecter and I had kept a close eye on for close to a week was described as a vibrant hive of activity, flooded with servants in royal colours and a team of tailors from Stormwind who were teaching Eleanor, a very rural priestess, to stitch in a way that was fashionable in the city.

She rambled on and on. Holly would come with her to Stormwind as a guest of honour; they would be royal crafters from here on, recognised throughout the human world; no doubt they would meet Prince Anduin and Varian Wrynn.

Each word was a tethering rope around my neck: I found I couldn't stop listening to this woman lying extravagantly to her dead child. Even then, devoid of the wisdom I've gained since, I knew better than to tap more deeply into her mind, but part of me wanted to. I wanted to explore the emotion behind all this. It was all so raw, so broken. What would happen to her, I wondered, if we took her child away?

'Hecter,' I said, 'I don't think we can do this.'

But as I said it, more focused on the scene in the attic than the face of the desperate man in front of me, I sensed something otherly. I picked up the faintest hint of another mind nearby, just brushing against the edges of my awareness. Stretching out with the Shadow, I found nothing until I reached Holly's body.

I don't think I would have recognised what she had become if not for a childhood spent in the presence of powerful and ambitious priestesses and priests: the sort of people who had both the ability to succeed with difficult resurrections and the drive to attempt them.

The Light can resurrect the dead, of course, but there's a time frame for it: once that time has passed, the soul moves out of reach and only necromancy can retrieve it, with all the associated drawbacks. This means there is an instant when the soul hovers just over the final boundary, the point of no return.

In Stratholme, I witnessed what happens when an overly-ambitious caster attempts to drag them back from that point. Usually, of course, they fail outright, but when they don't, when the Light spreads like a net and successfully catches on a spirit so far gone that it's barely more than smoke, it is pulled back and preserved in the Light. These spectres are too amorphous, too detached, to return to their bodies. They become ghosts, moored to a corpse that will slowly degrade without them. They are sentient, not quite human anymore, and trapped.

This was the case with Holly. I do not think her mother was powerful like my own mother's contemporaries in Stratholme. I think her skill with the Light was so stunted that she couldn't secure a proper grasp on her daughter even a few hours from her passing. The resurrection failed and Holly was frozen in the Light.

I had just refused Hecter's request out of sympathy for his wife. Now, as I ushered my consciousness from Eleanor's mind to her daughter's ghost, I did so in spite of her. Holly's mind was almost completely blank, of thought, memory or emotion. She was so dislocated from the world that I began to think there was no hope at all. I had just turned to the task of freeing her into the nether when her spectral mind reached out and _clung_ to me.

_Don't go_. The words pressed directly into my mind. _Please don't leave me._

It burned. The Light binding Holly in place cut into my Shadow presence; I must have cried out because Hecter grasped my shoulders and shook me hard. All thoughts of Eleanor were lost in the moment. I lashed out with a Shadow spike and severed the Light bonds imprisoning Holly. The pain she dealt me made no difference: she was a child holding onto me and begging for help. I swaddled her in the Shadow and drew her with me as I retreated back to the roof. Hecter gave me another shake, frantic.

'I have her,' I said to him. 'Eleanor has her body.'

Now that I think about it, it was telling, the speed at which Hecter's panic levelled out and cooled into Deathstalker efficiency once I had relayed all I had see. As I crooned mentally to the lost soul cocooned in my power, he tore away at his love for his wife.

'She's lost her mind,' he said grimly.

'Aye,' I said, 'I think you're right, and it makes the task of retrieving the body much more difficult.'

'Does it?' asked Hecter.

'I'd say there's absolutely no chance of reasoning with her-'

'Leave that to me.' He passed me the little pouch we'd brought with us. 'Prepare your ritual.'

I suppose someone morally consistent would have stopped him then and made him think about what he was asking. Holly had already been bound to this realm for three years longer than was right. My necromancy would only prolong her unnatural situation.

Hecter wasn't thinking like that any more than his wife had done so when she attempted that disastrous resurrection. He hadn't considered the limitations of what I, an untrained and largely untried necromancer, could bring about.

Undeath as he knew it did not scare him. He was a man who had embraced his Forsaken state as an extension of his life. He surrounded himself with friends, living and undead; he procured me as a sort of wife; and he acted as though he lived on still.

He had seen my daughter, my Living child, grow and develop day by day. I believe he honestly expected an undead girl to do the same.

For my part, I didn't want to correct him. Neither did I have the heart to sever Holly from existence. Her quailing, terrified mind made me want to nurture her, look after her, so I took the stick of chalk from the pouch and I drew out the necromantic runes on the roof slates. When Hecter brought the body up onto the roof, I cast the spells my husband, Lydon, had warned me against. I secured Holly in her cadaver.

It occurs to me that I never considered what Hecter did to obtain that body. It took him a quarter of an hour. There were no screams, no raised voices of any kind. At the time, I somehow managed to assume the best: that he had used that personable nature of his, combined it with the adoration for her that I had witnessed when we first arrived, and somehow managed to convince Eleanor to let go.

Now I wonder if his other proficiencies silenced her objections. I bear a deep trench of unhealed tissue over my right breast from the last time he chose to deal with love using force rather than diplomacy, so I know full well what he was capable of. Neither was that level of dispassion out of line with a man who later gave nothing more than a shrug in response to every physical defect his daughter encountered.

There were several. Some of her tendons had rotten through. They snapped when she first tried to walk. The embalming fluid had ruined her senses of touch and smell. Her brain could not generate emotions. And, of course, she would never grow past the height of her seven-year-old self. Her father witnessed all of this and thought it was all worthwhile to keep her here.

This has become more about Hecter than Holly, which was not my intent. I've woven a lot of spells to help her. Mind spells, mostly, to allow her to feel again. The Shadow, of course, absorbs and retains things, so I puzzled out a way to grant her a small reservoir of Shadow energy to act as a new memory. I slowly created a simplistic but functioning nervous system to provide her with basic touch.

In fact, her quality of life has been my main concern for the two years she has been with me, almost eclipsing my care for Lia at times. I want to fix her body completely; I want to allow her to live as she would have done, had that fever never struck her down.

Two facts remain regardless. Firstly, I chose to imprison her in this state. Secondly, regardless of all my progressive, clever little twists of the Shadow, the necromancer spells I used to raise her in the first place remain in full. I have never been able to safely remove the elements of command woven into each incantation.

She is my ward, whom I love, but she is also my minion. Someday soon she may well recognise that this means she cannot truly love me back. I can't help but wonder if my recent mistakes have been subconscious attempts to hurry this along.


	11. Chapter 11

**Eleven.**

_Sixteen days from my first entry._

If Holly has come to any new conclusions, she hasn't had the opportunity to voice them. What I assumed to be dream visions have persisted into wakefulness: Lia purports to 'see' our emotions. Her eyes track invisible lights around the room and she comments on the things she sees as though they're utterly normal.

These hallucinations suggest she is still feverish, but she seems otherwise healthy. She is bright and alert, a little paler than usual but not sweating or splotchy. When I press my hand to her forehead I can't feel a huge amount of heat there, but I know better than to trust my sense of touch. It could still be fever based.

What keeps that from ringing true is the remarkable degree of accuracy in what she's saying. Earlier she took my hand and turned her wide grey eyes up toward my face, darting here and there as she assessed the air around me.

'Mama,' she said gravely, 'you could just think about now.'

I stroked her delicate fingers with my thumb. 'What do you mean?'

'Now,' she repeated. 'Me and Holly and you in the woods. Not all the other things. There are a lot of things.' She released my hand to gesture around me, then put her head on one side, squinting for a second before she broke into a broad grin. 'I can see Hecter!'

I started. 'What?' I spoke in unison with Holly, who turned away from the window to watch us.

'And a lady. And a tall man. Who's the tall man?'

Holly's eyes were on me; evidently she did not miss the way my eyes widened. 'I bet it's your dad,' she said, canny as ever.

'Is it him?' Lia clutched at my skirts, pulling a little at my pelvis and making me wince. 'Does it hurt?' she asked worriedly, drawing back.

'No, no.'

I had spent some time tending to my own wounds during the night, but only with middling success: although my pelvis was as secure as I could manage, healing bone with the Shadow is nigh on impossible. There are splinters of it inside me still that twinge with each move I make. Utterly off-balance in the wake of her insight, I used that pain to ground myself.

'Can you tell me what you see now?' I asked her, focusing for a moment on the stately figure of my mother.

Lia screwed up her face in concentration. 'She's not very tall, and she's got yellow hair that's all curly. She looks a bit angry.'

She can read my mind. Can that really be true? A childhood spent mostly by myself, spying on the clergy from my isolated tower, gave me a level of early affinity with the Shadow, but it certainly wasn't as focused as telepathy or anything of the sort. And Lia is so very young. Her attention span can stretch to a few minutes at best. And she has the benefit of constant activity and learning, of family. Perhaps close contact with me has done this. Is that possible? I don't know.

But it must be. The evidence is there. She has a legitimate skill. But no, it's not evidence, it's one tiny shred of information, and that can't be the basis for a formal hypothesis. I have to expe

* * *

I will restock my supplies so that I have the medicines to look after her if this proves to be the result of fever. I will observe further and I will not leap to conclusions. I will not treat this as something frightening, lest the girls pick up on my disquiet. Will deal with this scientifically and I will keep my head.


End file.
